Innovation & Learning Loop

Whether you are new or "used to" Design Thinking, there is value in understanding the model taught at Stanford and designed by David Kelly and Tim Brown. If you only have 5 minutes, watch the video above, read below and click on the blog article link. If you have more time and are ready to go deeper - skip to the end of this article for a link to the free Stanford design thinking virtual crash course through the dschool.  Here is a useful blog post by neo mobile  and introductory material describing design thinking. Are you ready to learn more?  Here is a f ree design thinking virtual crash course on design thinking through Stanford University's dschool . Thnaks for sharing this!  And now ... my 2cents. Why is this important?  For career creatives and innovative teams, the flow of "Design Thinking" will seem familiar. Parts of the mindfulness and the experimentation loop (empathize, define ideate, prototype, test) may be built...

In this video Alexander Osterwalder makes some great points and provides us with simple tools for use by entrepreneurs including his  Business Model Canvas  referred to in his book Business Model Generation . "No Business Plan survives the first contact with customers" - Steve Blank "The Plan is useless but the planning is everything" Dwight Eisenhower He Referred to Dan Roam and his books In this video talk Dan speaks about combining the verbal and visual for "ViVid". It's a set of tools that help us create visuals to work with our words. "Whoever best visualizes the problem is most likely to solve the problem"."the Person who comes up  They tend to get funding, feedback and help from others. That's because visualizing the problem helps map it out, shows that they understand the problem and can get help. Dan Roam: Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work from BrightSightGroup on Vimeo . Dan Roam's Vi...

Interesting book I haven't read ... yet =) If you've read this, drop me a line and tell me what you think. The Imagineering Pyramid by by Louis J Prosperi

There are thousands of innovation labs, hubs and maker spaces around the world. I obviously can't capture them all but to help you begin discovering your own  "innovation & learning loop" here's a short list of innovation labs, incubators, entrepreneur groups and labs that I've heard about. As an "old school" blogger I'm "logging" them here for my own use and to share with you. i2i lab Purdue Harvard Innovation Lab The MIT Media Lab Innovation Hubs, Incubators and Labs in our region ( DC / Northern Virginia / Maryland ) Aspen Institute Mason Innovation Lab  , ITE  (Lab for IT Entrepreneurship) , List of " Mason Makers " CapitolOneLabs in Mclean Nova-Labs in Reston CIT Center for innovative technologies List of local "incubators" (local startup office spaces on this list) Teqcorner in Mclean Tech Breakfast  (One Wednesday per month at 8am - find it on meetup) The incandescent light bulb image...

As a serial entrepreneur, agile coach and parent watching my kids grow up - I'm seeing the need to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in the world. I've always learned through a continuous loop of experimentation and believe this is a creative and learning skill. In the interest of sharing and hopefully getting feedback, I'm creating a web journal here to share what I learn as I go. to keep things simple and easy to navigate, I'll add what you (readers) need and hide (or revert to draft) old articles that nobody is reading.